Managing Employee Injuries and Disability and Occupational Safety

I NTRODUCTION

Section 1

A. H ISTORICAL B ACKGROUND The common law imposed a number of duties on employers for the protection of their employees and an action for damages could be brought for the breach of these duties. However, as a practical matter, the law failed to provide adequate remedies for injuries and deaths. The common law duties imposed upon an employer were:



To provide a safe place to work,

 To provide safe appliances, tools, and equipment,

 To give warnings of dangers of which the employee might reasonably be expected to remain in ignorance,  To provide a sufficient number of fit, trained or suitable employees to perform assigned tasks, and  To promulgate and enforce rules relating to employee conduct which would make the work place safe.

Before the no-fault system of workers’ compensation developed, when an employee was injured in the course of employment, an employer could escape liability when the employee was guilty of contributory negligence, where the employee assumed the risk of employment, and when the injury was the result of negligence of another employee. Workers’ compensation laws abolished these defenses and established absolute liability on the part of the employer, regardless of negligence by either party. Employer’s liability acts came into being in response to rising industrial injury and death rates in the 19th century and in response to dissatisfaction with the common law remedies available to employees. By 1908, almost every American jurisdiction had passed some type of employer liability act. Great Britain’s Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897 provided the prototype and was the forerunner of the majority of compensation acts passed in the early 1900’s in the United States. The British act contained important limitations: only hazardous employments were covered, there were no insurance provisions and the employer bore the complete burden of compensation benefit costs. The statute also gave rise to a key phrase “arising out of and in the course of employment” which is generally found today in compensation statutes in the United States. There was a gradual recognition after the turn of the century that the common law remedies of employees injured or killed on the job were filled with inequities. However, the states were slow to adopt workers’ compensation laws and initial attempts to do so faced legal and political opposition.

California was one of the first states to enact workers’ compensation legislation. Workers’ Compensation Laws in California are of constitutional and statutory origin.

Managing Employee Injuries, Disability and Occupational Safety ©2019 (s) Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 8